A merit pay bill for Florida teachers appears to be on the way to becoming law after passing in the Florida Senate on Thursday.

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The controversial measure allows school districts to base a teacher's pay on how well their students perform on annual tests.

Opponents called the bill an attack on teachers and said it's not a fair way to measure their performance, but supporters said it will fix a broken teacher evaluation system and end their ironclad lock on tenure.

One of the first significant votes of the Florida Senate was the approval of a teacher merit pay bill. The bill will tie how teachers are evaluated and paid to their student's performance on standardized tests.

The Orange County Teachers Association is one of the many unions that has long opposed such a system.

"If you're going to evaluate somebody, you evaluate them based on their performance -- not on somebody else's performance," Orange County Teachers Association spokesman Mike Cahill said.

But advocates of merit pay, including Gov. Rick Scott, argued it's the best way to weed out bad teachers.

"That's why Florida needs to pay the best educators more and end the practice of guaranteeing educators a job for life, regardless of their performance," Scott said.

The bill passed by the Florida Senate was a rewrite of a more sweeping bill vetoed in 2010 by then Gov. Charlie Christ.

With the current Senate and Scott in favor of the bill, and a similar version already passed by a House committee, teacher merit pay is expected to become law.

Merit pay aims to reward top performing teachers with bigger raises, but at a time when the state budget is already in the red and education funding is being cut, some said it's not guaranteed the money to support merit pay will be there.

The full House of Representatives will likely take it up for a full floor vote next week.